


Should and Should Not

by platoapproved



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3135056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platoapproved/pseuds/platoapproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angie and Peggy break some rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Should and Should Not

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prosopopeya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prosopopeya/gifts).



Peggy feels that she has every right to be uncommonly worn out, given the week she’s been having. By the time she reaches the Griffith Hotel, all she wants is to lie down and not see another soul until morning. While she waits for the lift, however, she is forced to resentfully smile at the watchful Miss Fry. The woman undoubtedly thinks badly of her already—too lazy to climb the stairs, when it’s only the third floor?—but Peggy is too tired to care much about the impression she’s making. If Miss Fry had been shot in the leg, she’d take the bloody lift, too.

She’s only just closed the door to her flat and kicked off her shoes when there is a quick knock at her door. She almost doesn’t answer it, but it can only be one person; she doesn’t want to confirm Angie’s suspicion that her hesitation to live here sprang from a dislike of her.

When Peggy opens the door, Angie shoves something into her hands as she brushes past her. “The layout’s the same as mine, but it sure looks a lot bigger without the clutter,” Angie says, by way of hello. She makes her way deeper into the flat without waiting for Peggy, as if she’d visited a hundred times before. Peggy looks at what Angie gave her: a small bag of sugar, with a bow around it.

“I also brought you this,” Angie announces, waving a smallish bottle of bourbon. By the time Angie’s found two glasses and starts pouring, Peggy accepts that there is no polite way to ask her to leave.

“You really must tell me how you snuck that up past Miss Fry,” she says. She leans one shoulder against the doorframe - partly to look casual, partly to take some of the weight off the leg that Jarvis pulled a bullet out of not too long ago. Angie is perched on the edge of the bed, making herself at home. She already seems far more comfortable here than Peggy feels.

“A girl has her ways,” Angie jokes, holding a glass out for Peggy. As she walks over to take it, every step sends a little stab of pain up her injured leg, but she doesn’t let it show. She’s gotten quite used to keeping pain from ever reaching her face. “And no one here really follows the rules, anyway. Nothing makes a girl want to bring a fella to her apartment quite like needing to sneak him in.”

A half-smile tugs at the corner of Peggy’s mouth, and she tells herself, untruthfully, she’s just her acting the part of the friendly new neighbor, because she doesn’t want to smile (or at least, doesn’t want to want to smile). 

This is exactly what she was afraid of. 

The glass she’s holding is ugly, with a thin belt of yellow flowers painted around it, but of course it doesn’t matter. It’s only a temporary glass. Temporarily hers, like the rest of the flat. Peggy takes a sip, and the alcohol burns its way down her throat. She can’t help thinking that the no-alcohol rule wouldn’t matter to Steve, since he can’t get drunk, but whether or not they had drinks wouldn't matter, because Steve already breaks the no-men rule.

Then again, none of it matters because Steve is dead.

“I’ll make you a deal, English. How about I tell you all the secrets of my smuggling operation if you tell me what you said to my favorite regular to get rid of him. Whatever speech you gave him, it seems like an awful useful one to know.”

Peggy comes out of her reverie, asks, “You saw that?”

“I saw you talk to him, and I saw him tip me ten times as much as he ever has before running out the door like he’d drunk a gallon of prune juice.” Angie smiles at her, coaxing her, clearly aware of Peggy’s distraction and sadness, making that awareness known in little and wordless ways. The act that fools Peggy’s coworkers so easily is not working here - or maybe she just doesn’t have the heart for it tonight. With a sigh that acknowledges Angie’s concern, Peggy finishes her drink in one big swallow and lets herself fall ungracefully onto the bed beside Angie. As she does, the bedsprings shriek dramatically under the sudden weight. Both women’s eyebrows raise and Peggy shifts experimentally, hears the bed’s accompanying loud creak. Angie giggles, and then Peggy can’t help giggling, too. Exactly what she was afraid of.

“Mine’s just as bad,” Angie says. “But they’re comfortable enough.”

“Is it supposed to be some kind of security measure against—what was it?—‘temptation, debauchery, and mischief’?” She considers bouncing on the bed to produce a comic, lewd imitation of how sex would sound on it, but thinks better of it. This is untrodden territory. Angie might look down on some of the rules, but agree with others. Peggy doesn’t know where the buried lines of her morality lay. Was she one of the girls sneaking in fellas, or did she just like to joke about the ones who did, while actually thinking less of them? Peggy has known plenty of women who would put on a show of modern wickedness, only to balk at actual, concrete transgressions.

“If it is, it’s not a very good one.” 

Angie refills their glasses. She looks different from this angle, in this light, with her hair down and her face washed clean. Peggy starts to undo her hair; when one of the bobby pins gets snarled at an awkward angle, Angie sets her drink down, a mute offer of help. Peggy nods, and Angie plucks it out for her. Peggy folds her hands on her stomach and Angie, understanding, finds the rest of the pins with her fingers, pulling them out one by one and setting them on the bed between them. Between the intimacy of it, and the relief of pressure on her scalp, and the alcohol, Peggy finds herself rather light-headed.

“And, tell me, has Miss Fry any security measures against girls in one another’s flats?” The question balances on a knife’s edge of innuendo; it’s vague enough that, if Angie doesn’t understand the implications, so be it. If Angie does understand, and reacts poorly, Peggy knows she can feign innocence and shock, pretend she is the one who doesn’t understand.

But Angie does understand, like Peggy thought she would. She smiles down at Peggy, dimples and all, and Peggy’s heart races. She tells herself it’s nerves. She’s on awfully thin ice. Why did she bring it up in the first place? She forgot she was supposed to be looking for opportunities to make Angie go away.

“Oh, the need for them would never even cross her mind,” Angie says, “I wouldn’t mention the idea to her. She’d probably have a heart attack, on the spot, and die.” Angie tosses the words out carelessly to fill the silence. All the pins are out, but she keeps combing her fingers through Peggy’s hair. Peggy doesn’t stop her.

“I wasn’t planning on it.” Peggy’s face feels too hot, and she closes her eyes. She shouldn’t be doing this. There are at least half a dozen distinct reasons why she should be doing just about anything at this moment but this. “Well, what she doesn’t know isn’t going to hurt her, is it?” Angie’s laugh is bright, and a touch artificial - to hide the nerves, Peggy thinks.

“You’re a lot more forward than I expected,” Angie murmurs, fingertips tracing the shell of Peggy’s ear, running down her neck. They are small movements, but bold, abandoning the pretense of being anything but touch for touch’s sake. “Maybe the accent threw me off. Is that the bourbon talking, or was I totally wrong when I assumed you were all reserved and proper?”

“Hardly,” Peggy scoffs. Of course, Angie is partly right. She can’t talk about some things - can’t put into words what is happening between them. But she tilts her face into Angie’s touch, and that communicates enough. Instead of saying _I want you to touch me more_ or _Are you sure you want to do this?_ , Peggy says, “It wasn’t really a speech I gave your regular. Only, I threatened to stab him to death with a fork.”

Angie laughs like it’s a delightful joke, and Peggy knows it is better to let her keep thinking of it that way.

There’s something about Angie that reminds Peggy of Steve, but she can’t pinpoint what it is. Is it her sense of humor, sudden and self-deprecating, always tinged with a dash of real sadness? Is it the directness with which she speaks, the honesty that borders on friendly confrontation? Is it the determination, worn sharp at the edges by humiliation after humiliation, rejection after rejection? Yes, that might be it. Peggy remembers how, especially before the serum, she could see Steve’s need to prove himself in everything he did or said: his tone of voice and choice of words, how he went silent and still when he was angry, the way he watched the people around him with a constant, defiant anticipation of insult. Angie is like that. The ways she expresses it are different - in Angie, that frustrated ambition shows itself in tight little smiles, in flashes of hostility that are sometimes envy, in the too-loose way she shrugs her shoulders or crosses her legs. But it’s fundamentally the same, and recognizing it makes Peggy’s chest ache.

Peggy wishes she hadn’t thought about Steve the moment before Angie decides to bend down and kiss her. She wishes there were partitions in her mind, so that she could tuck her sadness about Steve safely away at times like these. She isn’t thinking of Steve as she kisses Angie, so much as thinking about not-thinking about Steve. She wishes it were like in a film, and Angie’s lips were enough to drive all the thoughts from her mind. Ought they to be enough? She wonders if there is something wrong with her, that her mind does not go quiet even while she is kissing a beautiful woman, whom she likes, who makes her laugh? Should she be feeling, reacting, differently? And should is such a treacherous word, because with the _should_ s come the _should not_ s.

She should not do this because Steve hasn’t even been gone all that long. She should not do this because Colleen died and she has that habit of getting people killed. She should not do this because she ought to be focusing on her job. She should not do this if they are caught it would be dangerous, disastrous. She should not do this because—

“Ow!” It’s a sharp, involuntary sound; when Angie shifted closer, she rested her weight on Peggy’s thigh, not knowing that doing so dug her hipbone squarely into Peggy’s wound. Then Angie is apologizing and Peggy is apologizing and neither of them can make out a word the other is saying. They both stop at the same moment, and Peggy explains in a rush, “I hit my leg getting out of a taxi and there’s a rather bad bruise and you leaned on it and it startled me.”

But there isn’t a bruise, and the jolt of pain has brought clarity to Peggy, along with a _should not_ that is more immediate and more unavoidable than all the others. She cannot let Angie see the fresh gunshot wound on her thigh. It would lead to questions that Peggy can’t answer.

“Listen,” Peggy says, with sudden and brisk cheer that is not very convincing even to her own ears, “I’m— I don’t want you to think I’m kicking you out or that I didn’t— that I object, it’s just I’ve had a frightfully long day and I was really looking forward to getting a bit of rest, so do you think we can… sort of, pick up where we left off at some other time?”

Angie clearly isn’t fooled by the false casualness, but she smiles all the same. “You got it, English.”

Peggy watches her walking out, gives an awkward little wave as she slips out the front door. The walls are not particularly thick; she can hear Angie opening her own front door, and closing it. She lets her head fall back against the bed, running her hands over her face. 

She has the feeling her life is only going to get more and more complicated from here on out.

**Author's Note:**

> Maybe I will wrote more??? Who knows what the future will hold my friends.


End file.
